Having had the first Word of the Year for 2026 come out ridiculously early—even before October has ended—I thought it might be worthwhile looking at how this whole Word of the Year lark got going.
And the story behind it is as follows.
There is a mob called the American Dialect Society (although I’m not sure they’d like being called a ‘mob’).
It was founded in 1889 and is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America.
Its members are linguists, lexicographers, philologists and word professionals of various sorts.
The society publishes a quarterly academic journal called American Speech.
And it holds its big, annual conference every year in January (in a different American city each year, but always in January).
At one such annual conference 36 years ago (in 1990) they thought to themselves: ‘Hey, we have most of America’s great minds on words and language gathered in this room—we should all vote on a Word of the Year.’
This was, of course, a stroke of genius, and so they did it.
And they have been doing it every year since.
They will do it again in January 2027 when this mob of big brains will vote on their Word of the Year for 2026.
But after this had gone on for a while the dictionaries around the world noticed and thought they’d get into the act.
It is very hard to get publicity for dictionaries but announcing their very own Word of the Year struck the dictionary boffins as a way to get a bit of attention for their worthy publications.
And as soon as one started all the rest got into the act.
Now all the dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, Merriam-Webster, Macquarie… all of them) release their own Word of the Year as the months close in on Christmas.
It amuses me that (for the most part) they don’t agree but settle on different words as the most noteworthy of the year.
Although last year (it’s true) one dictionary chose ‘slop’ and another chose ‘AI slop’ so they were clearly on the same page.
As I reported yesterday Dictionary.com was first out of the blocks this year with their choice of ‘maxxing.’
Undoubtedly the rest will follow in the weeks ahead.
Tonight I will join John Stanley for 'The Word Clinic' on 2GB, 4BC, 2CC and the Tapt Radio Network. This is your chance to join in the conversation about our language (your comments or questions) by calling the talkback line or sending a text.
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